Who Knew? European East-West Knowledge Inequalities and Their Remedying

For this session of the working group Semi-Peripheral Theory | Tendencies of Contemporary Theory Production in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, our guest will be Tereza Hendl.

Debates on Europe have long been conducted as if its Eastern parts were not a site of knowledge production worth engaging with. A hierarchical East-West divide persists, centering the West as the source of ‘objective’ and reliable knowledge while rendering the East a subaltern semi-periphery. Recent responses to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine have further uncovered a power dynamic of inter-imperiality across many disciplines that have theorized (de)occupied Europe’s East, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia from Western-centric perspectives and Russia-centric frameworks. Such debates have not only fallen short of accounting for the impact of imperialist domination on directly affected populations but have also contributed to its enabling. This talk will explore the dominant patterns of inter-imperiality in theory and lived reality, alongside the rich lineages of East European dissent and resistance to both epistemic and material forms of injustice. Together, we will envision a path toward epistemically just and reparative forms of knowledge-making and discuss the latest research initiatives, such as the RUTA Association, that play a leading role in these efforts.

Reading:

• Tereza Hendl, Olga Burlyuk, Mary O’Sullivan, Aigerim Arystanbek: “(En)Countering Epistemic Imperialism: A Critique of ‘Westsplaining’ and Coloniality in Dominant Debates on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” in: Contemporary Security Policy 45.2 (2024), 171–209

Tereza Hendl is a philosopher working on issues of global health justice (University of Augsburg). Her research examines concerns of oppression, refusal, justice, and solidarity, as well as the ethics and epistemology of health technologies and interventions, and East–West hierarchies of knowledge. Some of her recent work explores European East–West inequalities and their effects on health and well-being, also considering the impacts of Russian and German imperialism on directly affected populations. With Daniel James and Morgan Thompson, she has received the 2025 Charles Mills Prize from the Journal of Applied Philosophy, for their paper on the ethical-epistemic issues in German migration and the collection of racial or ethnic data, and with Olga Burlyuk, Míla O’Sullivan and Aizada Arystanbek, the 2025 Bernard Brodie Prize from the journal Contemporary Security, the 2024 Best Article Prize from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies, and a 2024 Honorable Mention in the Heldt Prize from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS), for their paper on (en)countering epistemic imperialism and “Westsplaining.” Tereza Hendl is a member of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice (IRG-GHJ), founder of the Central and Eastern European Feminist Research Network, and one of the founders of the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation—initiatives that amplify and (re)connect marginalized knowledges and contribute to epistemic reparations.